Seeing Redd (22 page)

P
RETENDING TO be out for a stroll, Hatter passed through bazaars, promenades, and food courts, well-to-do and not so well-to-do neighborhoods, scanning the various scenes with a trained eye and hoping for some evidence of Molly's whereabouts. He made these excursions whenever possible, sometimes with Weaver at his side, though she thought they were simply a means for him to better familiarize himself with life in Boarderland.

An intel minister whose duty was to keep Hatter under constant surveillance approached. “The king requires your presence,” he said.

Hatter fell in step with the Doomsine and was soon seated in the royal tent, Arch pacing back and forth before his usual pack of intel ministers.

“As Queen Alyss' bodyguard—” the king began.

“Homburg Molly is the queen's bodyguard, Your Majesty,” Hatter said.

Arch smiled. “Yes, I forgot. You're with us now. As the
former
bodyguard then, of both Queen Genevieve and Queen Alyss, you have privileged access to every gwormmy-length of the queendom—more privileged perhaps than anyone except Bibwit Harte or Alyss herself—and you can travel anywhere within Wonderland's borders without attracting suspicion. For obvious reasons, I could not have recruited Alyss for the task I'm about to assign you, and Bibwit Harte is not physically capable of performing it. You are the only Wonderlander with both the access my task requires and the Millinery skill to accomplish it.” To his ministers, he commanded, “Give it to him.”

Hatter was handed a skein of thread wrapped in cloth.

“What you now hold,” Arch said, “is silk from Wonderland's green caterpillar-oracle, in total weight equal to that of a gwynook's wing. You are to return to Heart Palace with it. Once there, you are to scale the palace's tallest spire. At the top, you won't fail to recognize my Weapon of Inconceivable Loss and Massive Annihilation. You are to weave the entirety of green silk onto the weapon in this pattern.” Arch handed the Milliner a pocket holo-crystal, which showed what looked like the center of an Earth spider's web. “You must follow the pattern exactly. If, for any reason, you fail in what I ask of you, if you tell anyone what you're about, neither you, Weaver, nor anybody else will ever see Homburg Molly alive again. Once the mission is complete, you're to contact me immediately. But there is a time limit. If I have not heard from you after two revolutions of the Thurmite moon, you will never afterwards hear from your daughter.” Arch glanced at his wrist, on which there was no timepiece. “Now, Mr. Madigan, I suggest you get going.”

 

Suspecting that he'd be under surveillance so long as he remained within Arch's borders, Hatter passed into Wonderland before giving over all pretense of carrying out the king's mission, hiding in the brittle scrub of Outerwilderbeastia and waiting until the last traveler had proceeded through the official crossing. As soon as the card soldiers were alone, he shrugged daggers from his backpack and flung them at one of the demarcation barrier's pylons.

Clank! Clunk clang!

The soldiers whirled, at the ready. Hatter sprinted up behind them and, with his bare hands, rendered them unconscious before a single one glimpsed him. On the Boarderland side of the barrier: five guards.

Fthap!

Hatter's top hat was flattened into spinning blades and he was about to eliminate the guards when he realized: A disturbance might alert Arch. Better to leave as little trace of his reentry into Boarderland as possible.

Remaining on the Wonderland side of the demarcation barrier, Hatter walked two hundred paces in the direction of the Valley of Mushrooms, then activated the blades on his right wrist and pushed them into the ground. Dirt and clay and pebbles churned loose. He pushed the rotating blades deeper and deeper into the ground, using his left hand to clear away the debris until he had tunneled under the demarcation barrier and emerged on the Boarderland side. He made the fastest time he could back to Arch's camp, approaching from the direction of the setting suns so that he would be unrecognizable, a silhouette, to any Boarderlander who happened to spot him. Within a hectare of the camp, he took his top hat from his head, flattened it with a jerk of the wrist, and folded the blades into a compact stack, which he secured in the inside pocket of his coat. He then slipped off his coat and buried it with his backpack, marking the site with a melon-sized rock scarred by a spin of his wrist-blades.

Hatter glanced up at the sky. Already half a revolution of the Thurmite moon had passed and he wasn't even back where he'd started. But he proved lucky. Entering the Doomsine encampment, he came across a load of washing on a clothesline and made away with the loose-fitting pants, many-pocketed blouse, and hooded coat favored by day laborers: necessary camouflage, because if anyone recognized him, he and his daughter were dead.

W
HEREAS OTHERS would have stood gazing down upon the valley in silent awe at the gigantic, multicolored mushrooms and remarked that even the quality of the valley's light seemed more vibrant than it did anywhere else, Redd started the final descent into the caterpillars' habitat without pause or murmur. Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire tramped after her—Siren and Alistaire muting their amazement at a vista unlike any they had ever seen, The Cat stewing in worry because the valley had fully recovered from the devastation his mistress had ordered in her first months as Wonderland's queen. It wasn't supposed to have recovered and Redd might punish him.

But Her Imperial Viciousness had other concerns as she stepped along the valley's spongy floor, searching for the caterpillar-oracles in her imagination. The mushrooms were serving as a sort of cloaking network, deflecting her imaginative sight every which way so that all she saw were mulch and stalks and mushroom tops.

“We'll have to draw them out,” she said, conjuring a vendor's cart filled with fresh, aromatic tarty tarts in a variety of flavors.

Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire fanned the delicious scents out in all directions, and in less time than it would have taken a hungry Wonderland child to eat a single tarty tart—

“There!” Vollrath exclaimed, pointing to a blue smoke cloud that formed a beckoning hand.

They followed the hand to a nearby clearing, where the members of the caterpillar counsel sat with their bodies coiled beneath them as they puffed on the same antique hookah. Each of the caterpillars occupied a mushroom as distinct in color as himself: blue, orange, red, yellow, purple, and green.

“Mmm, tarty tarts to munch,” Blue said.

Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire began handing out the treats.

“I get the vanilla ones with gobbygrape filling!” called the yellow caterpillar.

“
I
want vanilla!” whined the orange caterpillar.

“Anything with choco-nibblies is mine!” the purple caterpillar cried.

“
I
get the choco-nibbly ones!” complained the red caterpillar.

“Ahem hum, I'll trade two caramel tarties for one of the sugar-dusted winglefruit-filled,” Blue offered.

“No way!” rebuffed the green caterpillar.

It was one of the most difficult things Redd ever had to do: stand polite and respectful while the larvae bickered like brats and stuffed their wrinkled faces, dropping crumbs and jellied filling onto their mushrooms. When they were no longer shoving three tarts into their mouths at once but nibbling one at a time, she said, “Wise, ancient caterpillars, my tutor, Vollrath, has informed me that for many years I've been remiss in not passing through my Looking Glass Maze.”

The red and yellow caterpillars were mouthing Redd's words as she spoke them, and the orange caterpillar motioned with his numerous right legs for Her Imperial Viciousness to
get on with it
.

“It's a circumstance I want to correct,” Redd said. “I already know that my maze is located in the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes, but I need you to tell me where the garden is.”

“Yadda, yadda,” said the purple caterpillar. “Yadda, yadda, yaddda.”

“The question is not
where
the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes is but
when,
” Blue grumbled, his mouth full of caramel.

“When the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes is?” the orange caterpillar asked, doubtful.

“That's the question!” exclaimed the red caterpillar.

The oracles giggled and fell silent, alternately munching their tarty tarts and puffing on their hookah. Finally, with a look of exasperation, the yellow caterpillar said to Redd, “Du-
uh
. We're waiting for you to ask the question!”

Redd balled her hands into fists. “When is the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes?” she rasped.

“Oh, now and then, now and then,” Blue answered, upon which all of the caterpillars shook with loud laughter—all except Green, who continued to munch a tarty tart and blink at Redd with an appraising, curious expression.

Unable to hold back any longer, Redd aimed her crooked stick at them as if it were a rifle or bayonet and—

Foo-foo-foo-foo-foo-foosh!

Fireballs shot out. The caterpillars' six mushrooms erupted. Flames licked the sky, sizzled out as quickly as they'd come. The mushrooms had been charred black, but there was no sign of the caterpillars.

“Idiots! Useless idiots!” Redd shouted.

Vollrath, The Cat, Siren, and Alistaire dropped to the ground and covered their heads as she lashed out at the landscape, conjuring orb generators, crystal shot, and flaming spears. A shadow fell over them as an enormous scythe formed in the air and began to swing, lopping mushrooms flat. But at the very height of the violence—the exploding fungi, the thousand razor-cards shredding mushroom stalks—Redd felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and there was the green caterpillar, nonchalantly puffing on a small hookah. Redd held up a hand; the outsized scythe paused mid-swing, the orb generators and razor-cards and flaming spears hung suspended in mid-flight.

“The Garden of Uncompleted Mazes exists in the could-have-been,” the oracle said. “What could have been was
then
. But it is also
now
. Do you understand?”

“I don't want to understand. Tell me where the garden is or you will lose the valley forever.”

The caterpillar pulled at his water pipe and considered the renegade princess before him: the hate-infused creases of her toughened skin; the knotty hair; the gown of rose vines in constant slithery motion. At length, he said, “To get there, it is necessary for you to think back to the precise moment when your becoming queen—a thing to be—became a could-have-been. Let your mind be wholly absorbed in that moment. Give yourself up to it. Reexperience it in all of its emotional devastation. Once you accomplish this, you will see, somewhere in the rear of the memory, a small door. Through this door, you will find the garden.”

Redd was suspicious. “Why are you telling me this when the others didn't?”

“Let's just say, it gives me something to do.”

The caterpillar exhaled a cloud of green smoke. It enveloped Redd and the others, and when they awoke, they were alone.

P
ARTING FROM Redd, Jack of Diamonds had lumbered breathlessly into the first encampment that fell in his way.

“Your leader!” he'd said to the Gnobi tribespeople lolling about. “It's important that I speak to your leader immediately! Your future freedom depends on it!”

The Gnobi, when not roused to violence, were a sluggish clan, the least nomadic of Boarderland's tribes. Not sensing any immediate threat to their freedoms in the person of Jack Diamond, they had responded to his urgency with characteristic listlessness.

“Myrval's tent is somewhere that way,” one of them had said with a vague wave of the hand.

“Follow the sound of the snoring and you'll find it,” another had suggested.

But there had been a fair amount of snoring to be heard in the camp, and not until Jack had roused several civilians from their naps did he catch sight of the only tent with a pennant flying from its roof and two males asleep on stools at its entrance.

“Guards,” he'd said to himself.

He had marched past the slumbering guardsmen and, in the tent's front room, discovered five more sleeping guards—two slumped on chairs, two curled up on floor mats, and one snoring on his feet. What Jack had come upon was no less than a festival of snoring, a riot of honking inhalations, snotty exhalations, and inarticulate mutterings. But louder than all of these, coming from the back room: the wail of an ailing jabberwock. Jack had stepped into the back room and seen a lone figure asleep on a cot.

“Myrval!” he'd called, unsure, which had caused the sleeper to groan and roll toward the wall.

“I'm an emissary of Redd Heart, former and future queen of Wonderland,” Jack had said, shaking the Gnobi leader awake. “She has sent me here with a proposal that can guarantee future peace and freedom for the Gnobi tribe—for
all
of Boarderland's tribes. But it's a—”

“That's nice of Miss Heart to think of us,” Myrval had mumbled, and again closed his eyes.

“We must arrange a gathering of the tribal leaders to discuss the details of Mistress Heart's proposal, a summit.”

“
You
can arrange what you like. I have nothing against nineteen of the twenty other leaders, but Gerte, who heads the Onu tribe, insulted my daughter. He's an abomination and I will never meet with him unless he is to apologize.”

Jack had been about to promise this and anything else when Myrval yawned, “The Gnobi and Onu are on the verge of war.”

Jack had had similar trouble with the rest of the tribal leaders, each citing one of their number with whom they refused to have any dealings that did not involve bloodshed. Several of them also took offense at Jack's not having physically visited their camps to request their attendance at the summit, seeing in this his favoritism of the Gnobi tribe. But Jack of Diamonds had exercised his powers of persuasion to the utmost. At last able to convince the twenty-one leaders to talk, he was now in one of Myrval's conference tents, with Myrval seated on his left, a fire pit glowing in front of him, and the faces of the other leaders on screens around the pit.

“What I have already said to each of you singly,” Jack began, “I repeat to you now that we're together. You are made subordinate to King Arch by the antagonisms he invents to keep you at war with one another. He does this to prevent you from joining together to fight his forces, knowing that he doesn't have the military power to defeat you if you formed a coalition against him.”

“That's insane,” said the Sirk leader. “Just yesterday, I got word from a reliable spy that the Fel Creel are gathering beyond the pale hills in preparation for an attack against us.”

“That's your justification for the attack
my
reliable spy says
you
are planning!” shouted the Fel Creel leader.

“We planned no attack until we learned that you were.”

“Ditto!”

“This proves what I've been saying,” Jack interrupted. “It's obvious that neither of you would be attacking the other if not for the ‘intelligence' you received. The Sirk tribespeople would go about their peaceful business and the Fel Creel would go about theirs.”

“Right!” said the Sirk and Fel Creel leaders.

“But the intelligence you both received was false,” Jack explained. “It came directly from King Arch in order to put you at deadly odds. Just as the ‘intelligence' the Catabrac received of an impending ambush by the Shifog was false, as was the report the Shifog received of the Catabrac stockpiling weapons to annihilate them.”

The Catabrac and Shifog leaders mumbled in surprise; neither had mentioned these intelligence reports outside of their own tight-lipped clans.

Jack turned to the Gnobi leader. “And Myrval, I assure you, Gerte of the Onu tribe never said your daughter looks as if she's been put together out of spirit-dane droppings and that her personality is just as foul as her person. I was there when King Arch thought up that particular bit of ugliness.”

Myrval said nothing. Each tribal leader was glancing at every other, unsure what to believe.

“He might be speaking the truth,” said the Maldoid leader.

“How else could he know the exact wording of the insult?” Myrval answered. “I have never repeated it, not even to Gerte, who I assumed recalled his own foul words.”

“I'm glad to see that I'm gaining credibility,” Jack said. “Now, as Redd Heart's emissary, I've come to propose that you all unite under Redd to battle Arch. King Arch will be defeated and, in exchange for helping you take control of Boarderland to govern equally among you, Redd asks only that you fight under her command for another teensy little war with the forces of Alyss Heart, so that she can regain control of Wonderland.”

“Excuse me,” said Myrval, “but now that you have informed us of Arch's methods, why should we fight under Redd's command when we can battle Arch without her help?”

“Because,” Jack said, “to fight Arch on your own, you will be required to choose a leader from among you. I'm just guessing, but I think there'll be more than a little argument over which of you is best fit to lead the others. With Redd at your head, you are all equal.”

“With Redd at our head, we are all equal,” repeated the Maldoid leader, encouraged.

“Redd Heart is not known for being trustworthy,” said the leader of the Awr tribe. “But even supposing that we agree to this proposal, and that she leaves Boarderland under our control as she promises, we would still have to contend with her as our neighbor. She would make a dangerous neighbor.”

“She ruled Wonderland for thirteen years without causing Arch much trouble,” Jack said. “I urge you not to let this opportunity for true freedom pass.”

“And why is Redd suddenly so concerned about
our
freedom?” asked the Kalaman leader.

“Her Imperial Viciousness is primarily occupied with regaining her crown. The easiest way to accomplish this is to engage you all as her mercenary army. Happily, you stand to benefit from the arrangement as much as she does.”

“We would like to discuss the matter in private,” said the Glebog leader.

“Of course.” Jack rose to depart. “But allow me to say one more thing before I leave you to your decision. If you accept Redd's proposal, you face the uncertainty of a future that you will, at the very least, have some power to shape. But if you reject the proposal, you're doomed to remain as you are, with only the freedom to fight against one another for as long as Arch lives.”

Jack stepped from the tent, his words—the wisest he'd ever uttered in his life—lingering after him.